Raising taxes

California is in a series budget crisis, with a growing deficit and a shrinking revenue stream. Part of the reason for this is all of the special propositions over the years that have been passed, requiring the legislature to pay for certain things from certain revenue streams, and not pay for other things out of other revenue streams. The whole system has left the politicians in Sacramento fairly paralyzed in terms of how to make changes or adjustments to the budget.

This November, there will be propositions on the ballot to increase taxes in California. The one submitted by the Governor will raise income tax on the very wealthy, and increase the sales tax, and let all revenue go to the general fund, instead of being earmarked for this or that. It sounds like a good proposal, and I hope it passes.

Ironically, it will take a 2/3 majority for it to pass, because of another proposition passed in the 1970s.

By contrast, raising taxes in Iceland seemed a much simpler affair. The legislature simply wrote and passed a law about it, without the general population getting to vote on it. Imagine if 2/3 of Icelanders had to agree, to make any new taxes a reality.

Violence and children

Palmer just finished reading a book called Peter Nimble, which, although it has a happy ending, has a very dark and violent first few chapters. My son is really not a fan of people being mean to each other or hurting each other or being killed or even dying.

His father just ordered him the full set of Harry Potter books, which to me will be even worse than Peter Nimble because of the constant air of tension, betrayal, and intrigue at his magic school. One little bit of violence seems better than a constant sense of tension and uncertainty.

But both are part and parcel of life, I guess.

Icelandic blogs

About four years ago, I started reading Icelandic blogs. Ones on Eyjan, ones on mbl.is, some on kanika.is, and on Blogg.gattin.is.

It started out as a productive way for me to learn modern Icelandic vocabulary. What I had learned in school at Berkeley was Old Norse; we don't teach modern Icelandic. And what I had learned at home from my family was rather simple conversation. No one talked to their half American cousin about Icelandic politics or government or laws.

So I have really learned so much reading Icelandic blogs. My language skills have improved immeasurably, but more importantly I feel like I have been given an amazing free course on Icelandic civics. It has been so interesting and enlightening, and well I really should thank everyone whose blog I read, which is basically any Icelandic blog I see. Ever since I was a young girl, I have wanted to understand Icelandic culture, which I recognized even then as totally distinct from American culture. Through reading your blogs, I feel so much closer to that goal, and it makes me happy.

Since I moved back to California last year, I have continued to read Icelandic blogs. The purpose now is a little different. When I lived in Iceland, it helped me participate in conversations with my friends and colleagues; blogs, much more so than the newspapers, kept me in the know about the important events and debates. Now, here in California, knowing about things like the election for bishop going on right now, or Bjarni's attempt to stop the indictment against Geir, is not called upon in normal conversation here, like it was in Iceland. No one else in California that I know is so up on current events in Iceland as I am. But still I keep reading the blogs. Partially this is because they still teach me new vocabulary and phrases; daily there is something I need to look up in the dictionary (especially from Jonas' frequent blogs- I suspect he makes up a lot of his own words.) I also keep reading because I very much miss Iceland, so it helps to get news of what is going on. But also it is out of habit. It is actually a hobby for me, a recreational activity. When I want to take a break from my dissertation, when I am sitting alone having a cup of tea, when I am bored, I read Icelandic blogs. I don't do it as thoroughly as I used to, and am now more selective about whose blog I read, but one thing hasn't changed. I still enjoy reading Icelandic blogs, and I have no intention of stopping anytime soon.

Just because it is no longer a necessary part of my life does not mean I will be turning my back on the flow of ideas, freely and easily obtained with a click on a link.

Thank you, Icelandic bloggers, for all you have taught me.

SASS

The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies is an American scholarly organization that mainly does two things: publishes the journal Scandinavian Studies and organizes the annual SASS conference. This year the conference will be in Salt Lake City, because one of the most active academic departments in the country for Scandinavian Studies is Bringham Young University in Utah. Although the university and most of the professors there are mormon, the conference will not be a non-alcoholic conference. Which is a good thing, since it is really the social aspect of the conference that makes it so great; reconnecting with old class mates and colleagues who are flung across this vast country. It is a small enough community of scholars that we do, generally speaking, get to know one another, especially if one goes to this conference regularly, which is fairly intimate by academic conference standards (smaller than the Saga Conference in my experience). The quality of the papers is rather uneven, and because Scandinavian Studies in the U.S. covers everything from Old Norse mythology to Henning Mankell crime novels, one is usually hard pressed to find a paper that deals with an issue one is genuinely invested in. Rather it is a bunch of things that are good to hear a little bit about, but nothing that will profoundly shape one's academic thinking. 

My friend Amanda always looks forward to SASS much more than I do, because she knows almost everyone in the field and is really excited to see all her friends and colleagues. I know fewer people (unless they went to Berkeley), and tend to find conferences valuable only in so much as I learn something applicable to my own research. But still I guess it will be fun. 

At least I know Ghant will be there, who specializes in Scandinavian Jewish authors, and I can ask him how he has enjoyed having to teach a class about the Vikings. Such is the nature of Scandinavian Studies in the U.S. 

Jóni

When I moved back to Southern California in 2003, after my work at the Smithsonian was over, I met Sigurjón, who was then the Icelandic Consulate in LA. I told him about my work with the Viking exhibition, and he mentioned that he thought the world was still waiting for a really great Viking film. When I went to see him at his offices in LA a few months later, I arrived terribly overdressed - it turns out that people who work on films dress really casually, I had no idea! - and much too nervous to have any sort of decent conversation. But he told me that his friend was working on something that might be really epic, related to Njals Saga. I don't know if Mel Gibson's announcement about doing a Viking film (I met the woman who gave Mel the first draft of that script back in 2004 and still get Christmas cards from her) delayed other projects, or what. But it seems to me neither Jóni, nor his friend, have done an epic Viking movie of late.

Móðirin í Íslenskum Ljósmyndum / Mothers in Icelandic Photographs

Today I received in the mail a beautiful book, filled with photographs of Icelandic women and their babies. It is the exhibition catalogue from the Reykjavík Museum of Photography's exhibition from the year 2000, when Reykjavík was a European City of Culture.

Reading through the book made me tear up, think of my mom and my grandmother and all the photographs I have seen in all the livingrooms of all the family members I have spent time with in Iceland. It made me think of the exhibition at the National Museum, which I have analyzed in an article for Nordisk Museologi as a statement of the importance of women in Icelandic history. And it made me think of all the women I know back in Iceland, most of them mothers, some of them grandmothers, all of them lovely.

Good morning

It is a cold clear morning here in California, after several days of rain. In a little bit, I will be going with Palmer's class to the Botanical Gardens at UC Berkeley. Palmer has been learning about botany the last few weeks and has really enjoyed it. So I am looking forward to taking a guided tour of the gardens with him and his classmates.

When I was living in Iceland, I rather missed being able to go to a botanical garden. There are of course lovely parks and gardens in Iceland, but a botanical garden combines the enjoyment of a stroll in the park with the enjoyment of learning something new. In a botanical garden, there is a sign next to each tree and flower telling visitors exactly what species it is, and often other interesting facts about the plant's life cycle.

In the US, we call places like that "opportunities for life-long learning." I do not believe there is an equivalent Icelandic term, for the same reason there are no botanical gardens in Iceland.

Of Monsters and Men

I know I posted on facebook about this band before, but I don't think I have blogged about it. I was first introduced to this band by my parents, who were introduced to it by my cousin Sverrir, who was living at my parent's house while working on his pilot's license late last year. The reason Sverrir is such a big fan of the band is that his little brother, Brynjar, is in the band. So that means my cousin is in the band that won last year's best new band contest in Iceland, and whose band, Of Monsters and Men, now has a US tour lined up. My mom is going to one of their concerts in West Hollywood next month, and told me to fly down and join her, but I don't think that will work out. Instead, the next time I hear the band on a radio station here in California, I won't just think cool that they are from Iceland, I will think hey that's my cousin! Ok, 3rd cousin, but whatever. (His great grand mother and my great grandmother were sisters, and his great grandmother is the woman I am named after.).

The point is they are hot at the moment, and getting hotter.

GCB

I did not watch the Emmy's, the awards ceremony for the television industry. But I did watch the Oscar's last night. And I was struck by the commercials that were on during the Oscar's. There were a whole series of ads featuring Ellen Degeneres for JC Penny, which has a new campaign about simplifying the shopping experience: no more gimmicy 6am sales, no more hassles with returns, no more snotty sales clerks. I rather like JC Penny, and so I rather liked this new marketing campaign.

And I certainly liked the ads for JC Penny much more than the ads for the television shows. The Oscar's were broadcast on ABC, so ABC used some of the commercial spots to promote their own programming. One show in particular kept getting promoted, something called GCB, which I understand stands for Good Christian Bitches.

From the ads, the show features a group of women who regularly attend church in Texas, for the sole purpose of being able to say mean and nasty things about one another, sometimes to each other's faces and sometimes behind each other's backs.

Ever since I saw the first ad for this a few weeks ago, I have been thinking about how relentless television has become at offering to Americans more and more morally degenerate characters. At least with the crime shows that were big in the late 1990s and early 2000, where the seedy underside of life was highlighted, there was at least a veneer that the good guys would triumph. But lately, the shows have become more and more about a group of horribly amoral people who do nothing but belittle and undermine one another. Maybe the reality TV shows made this popular, maybe the shows about the mafia made this popular. I don't know. All I know is it is really reaching ridiculous dimensions now, and it needs to end.

But I must say, I think this is a television problem, and not an entertainment industry problem. Because what the Oscar's were about this year was a return to simpler values. A silent black and white film won. A story about mistreated working class people won in two categories. A foreign film showing everyday life in Iran won, a documentary about women who had been abused by their community won. All of these films stood for something, had a moral core about them. I noticed too that the dresses showed less skin, less cleavage, and were more about being elegant and beautiful than vampy.

So while television may want to keep forcing us down the road of more and more moral bankruptcy, I think a backlash is already developing. American seems to have hit moral bottom, and it is time to start working our way back up again.

Blossoms

Down at the Starbucks around the corner from Palmer's school, where I am spending my morning, I happened to notice the plum trees and the cherry trees are already in bloom.

Ash Wednesday

When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, many years ago in my early 20s, I managed a cafe that had about 15 employees, almost all of them students at Berkeley like me. It is amazing to me how well I remember their names and their faces, even to this day. I took the responsibility of managing them really seriously, and remember with some horror the one time I did not check up on the morning crew, only to discover later that day they had failed to bake the bread or make the soup. Lunch time that day was disastrous, needless to say. And I really felt it was my fault, for not coming to check in on how things were going; instead I was at home studying for a midterm.

Anyhow, one of the girls working there was named Emilia, she was from Los Angeles. Not one of the suburbs of Los Angeles, but from downtown Los Angeles. She was Hispanic, and very Catholic. She was a good worker, very sweet, and I liked her a lot. So I felt pretty bad one Wednesday when she came into work, and I said to her "what is that thing on your forehead??" She had been to church that morning, and the priest had made the sign of a cross on her forehead with the sacred ashes that give Ash Wednesday its name. I suppose this is a relic from Judaic practices, where a fattened calf was sacrificed, and then the ashes were preserved for medicinal and sacred purposes.

That incident stuck with me, like everything else about those days, and contributed to my sense of the importance of Easter. Anyone who observes Lent is doing something good for their soul, I do believe.

Traffic

Well Palmer and I are heading up to the mountains and I am looking forward to getting out of town and hopefully getting in a better mood, after a hard day. My students were uncooperative and I still have a cold.

But mapping my route, I see there is tons of stop and go traffic. This never would have happened in Iceland.

Forum

Today KQED public radio had a program dedicated to online dating, especially to the problems with algorithms used to pair people with their ideal match. It was a very interesting program, but I missed getting to call in. I was going to ask if there have been any studies of people who get addicted to looking at profiles and chatting people up, but never actually going through with setting up face to face meetings. Just trolling online dating sites for the heck of it.

The Arctic Studies Center

My parents have always enjoyed getting the annual newsletter from the Arctic Studies Center, the office of the Smithsonian where I used to work. My former colleague there, Igor Krupnik, used to say about the newsletter, which often got up to 36 pages, "never have so few written so much about so little." But the fact is although the staff of the ASC is only 4 permanent full time employees, the Newsletter has always included lots of other contributors, everything from interns volunteering on special projects to scholars who want to have a new project highlighted in a non-academic way.

Last year Bill wrote up a piece that included his assessment of Vikingaheimar Museum in Reykjanesbaer, after he toured it and enjoyed a reception with Jon Baldvin, Einar Benediktsson, and Gunnar Eyjolfsson.

This year, Stephen Loring, who is generally in charge of soliciting outside pieces, invited me to say something about my dissertation research. This was especially welcome, since Stephen is actually the person I plan to dedicate my dissertation to. And it isn't because I crashed his car Labor Day weekend 2001, or because he almost died of a stroke in 2000, or because he is a wacky Libra, or because he is married to one of the coolest feminist archaeologists, or because he is the only person I know whose twin brother is a race car driver, but because he gave me my first real break into academia, working on a summer project about Alaska. He handed me a book, and a map, and told me to think about a Native community on Nunavut Island, Alaska, in the 1920s. And that's what really got me going on this whole interpretive angle. So Stephen can ask me for an article anytime he wants, and I will gladly oblige.

Life-long learning

Today I signed Palmer up for a week-long summer camp in Berkeley where the kids learn all about theatre and then perform on stage at the end of the week. I am really excited to have gotten Palmer in: there were only a few spots left even though the class is scheduled for late June. It is that sought-after of a program.

But then Berkeley is the kind of city committed to learning, in every sense of the word, and for a lifetime. It is the kind of city that believes growth and change and experiencing new things is what makes the journey worth living. It is where the progressive movement started, but it will not be where it ends.

And I am proud to be doing my part, albeit in a more traditional way, teaching a writing course to students at Cal. I am trying to teach them to be excited about learning and researching, setting them up for a lifetime of being able to tackle a subject they know very little about, and dive right into it, confident that they will be able to gather up the resources they need. And I am sure the training I am giving will be put to good use.

Because Berkeley is the kind of place that inspires people to be more than they have always been.

With a good friend...

I have never been a great one at accumulating female friends, although I did manage to make some good ones while living in Iceland. In the U.S., it has been tougher going, averaging about 1 fun and interesting female friend every five or six years, with dry spells in between.

I therefore consider myself most fortunate to have met Amanda my very first day as a graduate student at Berkeley. In a lot of ways we are a lot alike, obviously since are both interested enough in Scandinavia to be getting PhDs in the subject. We are also at the same place in the program, having started the same semester and planning on turning in our dissertations at the same time. But she is also one of the sweetest, prettiest, and kookiest grad students to have ever gone through the department, and I thank my pure timing luck that I ended up being this great woman's class mate (and yes, the feeling is mutual).

We had lunch together yesterday, and well, with a good friend, you can talk about absolutely anything, or absolutely nothing, and it doesn't matter at all. We're past the point of having taboo subjects.

No help there

I often expressed frustration, when I was in Iceland, at the lack of formality in terms of long term planning. I also expressed amazement at how often things do "rettast" (magically work out) in that fantastic little island. But no matter how many times I experienced that, it was never enough to dissuade me from preferring a well-thought out plan ratified by all involved parties.

Thus it was with some dismay that in talking to my supervisors at Berkeley recently that I got a similarly "thetta rettast" kind of response. I asked my dissertation advisor and the chair of the department the same question: did they consider it important for me to file my dissertation now in May? Both of them went to great lengths to explain that there was really no need for me to do so, and that it might in fact it might be better if I waited until December to file, so whatever I wanted to do was fine.

Of course academia is probably the most casual and least structured of institutions in the United States, so I should not be surprised that it would have a "free flowing" (Icelandic) management approach.

But I need some incentive to get this dissertation done. I really do. Otherwise, I'll just keep plugging away at it in my turtle like pace. I know I'll get to the finish line, but when is a whole 'nother story.

Competition

Today California's Supreme Court upheld the lower court's decision declaring Prop. 8 unconstitutional. And the Republicans running for nomination had a show down in three states. So it was a big day in the news, all about big high stakes competitions that drag on and on.

Here in my house, I am happy to report things seem to be settling in with my new cat, a boy cat named Tristan. It is always a dicey proposition, to add another cat to a household. The little girl cat I had has vacillated between hiding from him, staring at him, following him around, hissing at him, swiping at him, and rolling around the ground purring near him. I think however I might have lucked out, and I am not going to have the typical cat competition over who is the alpha cat. Instead I believe they have worked it out, that they are both the alpha cats in their own ways.

Now if only gay marriage and political battles could be decided without intervention from the International Court at the Hague, there might be some hope.

On being a good teacher

The part I do not like about being a teacher is giving out assignments. I guess I am not enough of a power-tripping controller. Telling people that they have to do such and such by such and such a date has never been my style. Rather, I prefer for everyone to have a sense of working together towards a common goal. If they are adults, who have chosen to take a course, then I should not have to be forcing them to do anything.

Unfortunately, at the moment I am teaching a course that is a university requirement, meaning that students are taking it because they have to. Which takes a lot of the joy out of learning, if you ask me.

Road Kill II

I logged about roadkill in Iceland way back in 2008. Today in California, driving from Walnut Creek today, through Moraga, and then into Berkeley, I saw the following road kill: a dead skunk, a dead squirrel, a dead dear, and a dead fox. The dear has been laying dead by the side of the road for about a week, the skunk for three days, the fox for a day, and the squirrel must have died overnight since it was not there yesterday.

I am tired of living a life so reliant on an automobile, I say to you truly.

School psychologists

The modern public education system is foundational for democracy, both in Iceland and in California. With this comes a certain hubris, that the school is rather "responsible" for a child, in a way that almost relinquishes responsibility from the parents. Of course, schools always talk about how essential parental involvement is, but it is far too easy to not get involved, and just to let the school handle whatever issues or problems come up. Plus it is difficult, as a parent, to know how to be involved without feeling like one is interfering or complaining or making the jobs of underpaid teachers and school administrators worse than it needs to be.

Today though Palmer's father and I and his pediatrician all agreed that in some things, the school should not be taking the lead. Because we know Palmer far better than any teacher dealing with 20 students possibly could, or any school principal dealing with 300 students could, or any district psychologist visiting 7 campuses possibly could.

It may not be democratic, but families are far more foundational.